Thanks to all those who replied to my question about constructive feedback
of hotel availability checking systems (the original post is at the end of
the message).
It seems that the Broadmoor hotel got quite a lot of attention - there is a
hope for good Flash design after all!
=> http://reservations.broadmoor.com/
Cheers, Florian.-
________________________
Gordon Montgomery:
expedia's system is pretty good though the prices aren't :))
www.expedia.com
________________________
Peter Boersma:
Have you checked the CHI2002 hotel reservation system? (Passkey) That system
shows you when rooms are available (light-green squares on a calendar).
________________________
Luc Carton:
Accorhotels.com has such a feature.
When no rooms match your request, a special screen is prompted with 5
choices:
No room available seems to match your request. Would you like to:
- Extend the request to include other hotels of the same brand
- Search for a hotel of the same brand close to your destination
- Find other Accor hotels in your chosen destination
(Only if your request concerns a particular brand).
- Change your dates or destination
- Make a new search
________________________
Hal Shubin:
Look for a conference that has the Passkey reservation system. They have a
visual interactive system, and I think it's pretty helpful. A little
complicated, though.
Try http://www.pkghlrss.com/liveres/res.asp?EventCode=LEI010102&action=new
Click SHOW HOTEL INFO, click on Embassy Suites in the dropdown list (don't
pick dates), click RESERVE in the right side, and you get the
date-selection mechanism.
Beats me -- I designed a replacement for this, but they never implemented
it.
________________________
Ted Booth:
have you seen <http://www.broadmoor.com>. They created a single
screen reservation interface. It may do the specifics you mention, or
not. I haven't used it recently. The 1-screen reservation interface
only works on Windows.
________________________
Ruth Huard:
Our company develops the booking engine for a number of independent hotels
and hotel chains. Our group (usability and UI development) have tried to
solve this problem in many different ways. The best solution we came up
with was to develop an availability checking system for all our hotels
(about 99% accurate), and implemented an availability calendar to display to
the users when the hotel was available.
Our group has a test website, www.amazingplaces.com where you can see our
availability calendar. For example, do a search on San Jose, CA (using
Quick Search). You will get to a search results page where you can choose a
hotel. On the hotel page, select a hotel, and you will get to the hotel's
"home page" where you can check that particular hotel's availability by
clicking on the "check availability" button. On this page you'll see the
availability calendar on the bottom of the page. Also, you'll notice that
if you entered travel dates (e.g., check-in/# of nights) using the Quick
Search (or on the search results page), we will indicate on the search
results page, which hotels have availability and which do not.
We have attempted to include various interface "tools" and instructional
content to direct users so that they would likely find an available hotel
that meets their needs: simple UI elements like allowing for sorting of the
hotel results pages, having availability indicators, not making travel dates
required, using directive error messages, etc.
________________________
Scott Nelson:
The way that Travelocity implements this for flights (I've never booked a
hotel through them...) is fairly good. Much better than Air Canada's site
itself.
Essentially, you can do two types of searches: specific dates or flexible
dates.
If a specific date search comes up with no results, it provides an easy
link to a flexible date search (make the error message useful!)
Flexible date searches list pricing and allow you to select dates from
calendars with a visual indication of available dates.
There are obviously different parameters with respect to hotel rooms (pool?
exercise room? etc.) but once you start entering those you're getting
*very* specific searches from users, and recommendations are less likely
to be useful or even necessary.
________________________
Christy Wells:
Have you seen the Broadmoore Hotel site? It was designed using a new Version
of Flash and minimizes page reloads. OK - so you need the plug-in to view it
and I don't have that at work, so I can't actually look at the site and book
res! But that aside, I did look at it at home and it does do some cool
things. The new version of flash works without reloading pages so forms and
things stay put, but availability is updated. There's an article in computer
world or something about it. Once you get over the plug-in problem, it
really does provide some good usability. The article also talked about the
irony of Flash providing good usability and the need for Macromedia to
educate developers on appropriate use of Flash. This just might be one -
once you don't need a plug-in to use it.
________________________
Andrew:
I was just sent this link yesterday as a demo of the new flash release.
Normally I'm hesitant with flash applications, but I think you'll find this
hotel site to be quite impressive, I did!
The hotel is called the "Broadmoor Hotel" and the reservation system is
built with Flash MX:
http://reservations.broadmoor.com/
*****************************************
Florian N. Egger, MSc
:: Faculty of Technology Management
Eindhoven University of Technology (NL)
:: ecommUSE user experience strategy
http://www.ecommuse.com
*****************************************
On Monday, March 11, 2002, at 02:33 AM, Egger, F.N. wrote:
> Hi there!
>
> I was wondering if any of you had good examples of neatly designed hotel
> availability checking systems... Instead of saying that no room is
> available
> for a given period, the system could provide constructive feedback and
> suggest alternative dates when rooms would be free. In addition, it could
> check availability in real time for other nearby hotels of the same chain.
>
> - Has anyone seen such availability checking systems?
> - Does anyone know vendors of such systems?
>
> Please send your replies directly to me and I'll post a summary to the
> list.
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
> Florian.-
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